0731 | The Tale of Genji | Murasaki Shikibu
It’s saga time! Cue three (or maybe four) characters whose names you can remember! Cue football stadium of characters whose names you cannot! Cue love! Cue forbidden love! Cue death!…
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0730 | Lost Illusions | Honore de Balzac
The primary importance of Lost Illusions lies in exemplifying that it wasn’t only English readers who suffered from 19th century writers’ predeliction to create unnecessarily long novels via serialisation in…
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0726 | Native Son | Richard Wright
This, the first novel about the black community by the black community in the US, was a page-turner as relevant now as when it was written during WW2. It’s incredible…
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0725 | A Severed Head | Iris Murdoch
I’m a big fan of Murdoch but this one just didn’t come up to her usual standards. To be fair to her, what I should say is that it doesn’t…
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0724 | The Double | Jose Saramago
Having enjoyed Baltasar and Blimunda, I was looking forward to this, particularly as it wasn’t going to be dealing with too much obscure Portuguese history. I’m also fond of Kafka-esque…
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0720 | The Underdogs | Mariano Azuela
If this didn’t influence Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, I’d be surprised. Azuela’s sparse prose and depiction of individuals caught up in events and landscape that they have little control over…
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0718 | Fantômas | Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre
Every now and then on the 1001 Books list, a novel comes along which is a complete walk in the park, takes absolutely no effort to read and is over…
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0713 | The Thirteen Clocks / The Wonderful O | James Thurber
Thurber’s wonderfully bonkers children’s books were so short that Puffin reissued two of them in one edition in the 1960s. This is very convenient because Thurber’s writing is the kind…
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0710 | Mother | Maxim Gorky
This reads like a cross between Dr Zhivago and the last part of The Jungle. It’s packed full of characters who, in true Russian fashion, each have seven names they…
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0705 | Baltasar and Blimunda | Jose Saramago
The last effort from Portugal I endeavoured to read through was the utterly futile Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. It is with great thankfulness that I can report Saramago…
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0703 | No One Writes to the Colonel | Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A book of short stories which is far, far more satisfying than ploughing your way through the tedium that is One Hundred Years of Solitude. What Garcia Marquez has done…
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0704 | The Circle | Dave Eggers
Whoever reviewed this for The Guardian said it was “prescient, important and very funny.” Two out of three ain’t bad, I suppose; there are precious few laughs to be had…
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0701 | Moon Palace | Paul Auster
Again, another Auster, and the only question you’re left with is why he bothered writing it. Composing this review by copying and pasting chunks of my review of The New…
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0699 | Pachinko | Min Jin Lee
My word this is a mess of a book. It’s a mess of a story, it’s a mess of characters, and most shockingly for me, it’s a literal mess: it…
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0698 | Possession | A. S. Byatt
Oh boy, it seems Virgin in the Garden wasn’t large enough of a stage for Byatt to perform her one-woman show of intellectual capacity. 12 years later, she’s back with…
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0696 | Amongst Women | John McGahern
Lyrically written as so many Irish novels are, this centres around the inscrutable patriarch of a rural family. Moran rules his family with an iron fist. He’s an old freedom…
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0695 | The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner
My my, you have to persevere with this one. Told from multiple viewpoints, what starts out as a completely fragmented narrative that is almost completely opaque gradually becomes more defined…
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0694 | Clear Light of Day | Anita Desai
Although this was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I couldn’t quite see where this was going or the point of it all. I kept expecting things to happen or the…
